Irrational feels it could’ve “done better” on BioShock 1

Irrational Games has said the original BioShock “could have been improved,” and there were plenty of things the team “would have loved to have done better”.

Speaking with Gamerzines, Irrational lead artist Shawn Roberts said the team has a plan in place to make sure BioShock: Infinite lives up to the developer’s expectations and is released with less regret.

“After putting three years plus into that game, I look at it and think, ‘Had I known this at that time we could have made this better’,” he said.

“We thought that the whole game could have been improved. I honestly feel that we’re our own worst critics – we ripped the game apart after we shipped.

“There are plenty of things that we would have loved to have done better, but it’s never a perfect world when you’re developing a game; you’re always going to be hit by hardware, time and budget constraints.

“We have post-mortems after every game and really try to be hard on ourselves; this is what went wrong, this is what didn’t work, how we can tweak that. Moving forward for BioShock Infinite we look at those things and say okay, well, combat wasn’t as great as it could have been.

“One specific example I can give you is, BioShock was mostly underwater corridors and lots of enclosed spaces, there weren’t many problems you couldn’t solve with a shotgun or by using electricity. We didn’t really encourage people to use all the tools they had.

“In looking at BioShock Infinite we realized that we want people to be creative and think about different tools that they can use in different varieties of ways.

“If we do our job well, every person that you ask about how they played through BioShock Infinite will have a different answer.”